


The American Sublime

by oldbosie



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-28
Updated: 2016-05-28
Packaged: 2018-07-10 17:27:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6997804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oldbosie/pseuds/oldbosie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Tactician that he is, he finds the likelihood of still being loved by someone who, thanks to him, has just awakened to a wicked hangover and a face full of cold piss next to nil."</p><p>Dick Winters and Lewis Nixon billet together at a farmhouse in Holland for a rare few weeks of peace and privacy, while Dick struggles to process his promotion and his time away from Easy Company. Set during the first minutes of Episode 5, "Crossroads." </p><p>Cows. Wildflowers. Feelings. Handjobs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The American Sublime

> 
>         _When General Jackson 
>     Posed for his statue 
>     He knew how one feels. 
>     Shall a man go barefoot 
>     Blinking and blank? 
>     
>     But how does one feel? 
>     One grows used to the weather, 
>     The landscape and that; 
>     And the sublime comes down 
>     To the spirit itself, 
>     
>     The spirit and the space, 
>     The empty space. 
>     In vacant space. 
>     What wine does one drink? 
>     What bread does one eat?_
>       

  
Their farmhouse in Schoonderlogt smells like raw white timber, chamomile and calcimine, wax and buttermilk and lye, the tank-scuffed silver birches trembling in the drive. Its cottons are creased, its enclosures quiet. The rooster had its neck wrung by a rifleman, and now it’s only fat hens bickering under their breaths, dairy cows picking their way across bowled-over fences to snuffle in the garden. Sometimes a grubby child will scamper past with pails of cream for breakfast, but for the most part this place seems shy of them. Lost for words and faces, it gives them fragrances for company—suds from shaving, sunburnt wood and brittle herbs, curds draining in the kitchen. They are grateful for this. It smells secret and daily scraped clean.  
  
Slumped furiously across its freshly-spread flax sheets, Lewis Nixon smells like Scotch whisky and piss.  
  
“— _for Christ’s sake!_ ”  
  
Standing over him, first light still bristling on his back, Dick Winters is experiencing a fear that all but fastens him to the whitewashed doorway where he leans. He hasn’t felt this kind of panic since the field, but it’s of that same unmistakable breed: a fear of loss that goes beyond the fear for one’s own life. For a moment, Dick is convinced Nixon will kill him, but this is not what flattens him, wide-eyed and speechless, to the wall—more terrible than that, Dick is afraid Nixon will hate him. In his horror, there is no space even for a twinge of indignation—no _it was an accident_ , no _what kind of man pisses in his water pitcher?_ —he’s too busy thinking that whatever chance he had of Nix forgiving him, of moving forward with this, or at least of moving on, has been obliterated. In the fraction of a second that stretches on for far too long, packed end to end with oaths, Dick believes he’s lost Nixon for good. Tactician that he is, he finds the likelihood of still being loved by someone who, thanks to him, has just awakened to a wicked hangover and a face full of cold piss next to nil.  
  
Lew looks truly miserable. There’s nothing Dick can do but glance again, bewildered, at the empty pitcher balanced on its crossbeam— _how on earth could this have happened?_ —and wait for the disgust on Nixon’s lips to settle into loathing.  
  
It does not. Nixon only continues looking sad and beat. As if he blames himself for pissing in his pitcher, and for getting too drunk even to make his way to the window and empty it. He swipes at Winters with a pillow, not a punch. And though it’s pitiful, pathetic, though Winters should feel something more like sorrow, relief fills up his lungs as sure as the stale stink of Nixon’s piss wiped off against the sheets. He catches the pillow as it hits his chest, too gently; catches sight of the uncorked bottle, emptied of Vat 69, keeled on its side.  
  
“Oh—” he says, grin splitting despite himself. “Oho!” It’s his close-call laugh, relieved but also reaching, a note enough of mockery to prod at Nixon, to engage him. A teasing, truly happy laugh.  
  
“Son of a bitch,” Nixon groans, but Dick knows he is safe.  
  
The hollow husk of October 6th is rattling in that laugh. And October 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th…In that laugh are the full dozen days Lew Nixon stayed with Winters in this little idyllic billet, nursing him through, of all things, not a wound but a promotion. Winters had been made battalion XO practically seconds after he saw upward of twenty of his men knocked flat by German fire. One kill, Dukeman. Even Nixon didn’t really understand how being pulled from Easy at a moment like that could be trauma for Dick, more wrench than blessing, bad as something bodily. Maybe his sympathy was limited by the strength of his desire to see Dick make it out of this alive. For Nixon, moving up and off the lines was the only kind of welcome change. But Dick felt differently. Dick was not all right.  
  
His first day as XO saw not a scrap of paper filed, not a single order handed down. No one but Nixon even caught sight of him. Sink assumed that Winters was learning the ropes, that he’d get into the swing of things by sundown—but another day passed, and another, and it became apparent that Dick was in no condition for the field if the field happened to be the approximate size and shape of an officer’s desk. By Monday, troops were aimless, logistics faced a massive pileup, and Sink was in hysterics.  
  
“Sir, don’t you think this is just what he needs? Get him out of the heat for a while, give him some rallying time?”  
  
“Dammit, Nix, he’s taking more time than we’ve got to give! I need you to get that man in fighting shape—I need that man able to do his job—I need Winters in this war!” Sink, almost in tears.  
  
“Sir—”  
  
“We are about to be in deep shit, Captain Nixon! Why, in Christ’s name, is our best man not where I left him? How are you to justify your recommendation if this horseshit continues? How am I to justify taking it?”  
  
That stung, and Nixon found himself producing words he thought, as captain, he had forgotten.  
  
“No excuse, sir.”  
  
“You will be responsible for his reports and orders until he’s fit,” Sink snapped. “And Nixon, see he does get fit. There will,” he added grimly, pushing past, “be hell otherwise.” Less an order than a plea.  
  
So Nixon hardly left this daisy-pale Dutch cottage for a week. Winters would get up in the morning, shave, do a few short minutes of PT—then something would roll over in his face. The alertness and intention seemed to stagger back to sleep, and Dick would continue fumbling around the farmhouse as if in a dream. His body made surreal, repetitive, ever-unfinished gestures—lifting sheets of paper only to let them drift back down again, picking up pens and angling them at the desk before replacing them. He seemed as incapable of listlessness as he was of action. It almost looked like he was doing his job after all—but it was Nixon who wrote his reports, suggested tactics and commands, listened to ten _yeah, sures_ a day, and every night fought hard to put the edge back in Winters’ eyes. He read through rosters while deliberately scrambling names and ranks; he’d draw up ration plans that, if they got approved, would starve the regiment inside of a month, hoping to at least provoke a correction if he couldn’t get a rise. He’d drink, he’d bicker, he’d berate, he’d goad, but Dick’s gaze would only stop at Nixon’s face to ask about Easy Company—otherwise it went on, out, into harm’s way with the men he’d left behind. Nixon came to see how Dick was navigating trenches as he picked his way around the breakfast tables and three-legged stools. He dreaded answering to Sink. _Well, sir, he’s not_ completely _catatonic_ …  
  
One night, Nixon didn’t drink. His temperance had not been planned, but he caught Winters’ glance beating his hand to the neck of the Scotch bottle, and that bothered him. Made him irate, actually. So he slammed the foot locker—Dick’s foot locker—shut again, and was grudgingly satisfied to see the XO flinch.  
  
“So someone’s in there,” he growled, empty tumbler gripped hard in his hand. Dick didn’t answer. Nix did not expect him to.  
  
“This is unacceptable,” said Nixon. He tried his best to scorch the floor at Winters’ feet with an accusatory stare while cut glass stamped into his palm. “Truly, Dick. Fuck me, I have never seen you pull a thing like this.”  
  
Winters had been not so much standing behind his desk as hovering slightly to its side, as if addressing it directly would have blinded him. He took a half step away from where Nixon rested his glare, and perceptibly wavered. He kept his eyes fixed on the lid of his foot locker, but something twisted at his lips. A hurt. A word.  
  
“Sorry, Nix.”      
  
“He speaks!” Nixon felt his anger softening against his will; a smirk unknotted on his mouth before the second syllable. He raised his gaze, moved slightly into Winters’ line of sight—into his attenuated circle of pale light.  
  
“Lew, I mean it. I’m sorry.”  
  
Dick held his downy lashes low, and something struggled under them. Nixon came close, as close as possible, half-sitting on the corner of his desk. When Winters didn’t move, Nix grabbed his shoulder, and, trying to be hard, heard himself be tender.  
  
“Hey, big guy,” he said. “Don’t be sorry. Just be—”  
  
Winters watching him. Clear and steady. What had struggled underneath his lids slipped free, and Nixon grimaced.  
  
“Just be _here_. Okay?”  
  
Dick sighed through his nose. Swallowed. Nodded no more than a candlewick.  
  
“Okay.”  
  
And Nix laughed soft. Mirrored Winters’ nodding. Nodded more. Laughed firmer. Knuckled at the salt and wet that dashed for cover underneath the line of Winters’ jaw.  
  
“Just like that?” he asked. “You serious?”  
  
Dick played unconsciously against the back of Nixon’s hand as if he’d been scratching his brow, gnawing his nail—something almost like a nervous tick or tell, a touch searching for comfort, a dislocated body seeking in its sleep. He flicked his eyes away but caught himself and trained them back on Nixon’s face. Forced them to stay focused, not to acknowledge anything beyond.  
  
“Yeah,” he said. He sighed again. “I’m done.” He tugged Nixon’s fingers tightly through his own and held them up. Pulled Nixon’s hand away from where it had been tracing. “I’m here.”  
  
That sad quirk of a smile.  
  
“Good man,” said Nixon, trying to pat Dick’s cheek with condescension but somehow getting snagged there. He tipped Dick’s chin instead, affectionately, before letting his hand swing free. “Damn right. Here with me.”  
  
Dick gently bent and pressed his forehead into Nixon’s chest, with a featherweight force that still knocked Nix nearly completely on his back across a pile of unsigned work orders. Straining to stay upright, Nix grabbed a corner of the desk; hooked his other elbow over Winters’ skull and held him; felt his flutter breath, his blink. Couldn’t say—couldn’t say anything. He kissed the top of Winters’ head and left his mouth resting where he could smell the oil in Dick’s fine hair, sense the heat that blushed out scarlet from his scalp, temples, tips of his ears. Dick’s skin felt fever-hot, Lew thought, wincing as the color bristled in his own.  
  
It was a long, slow-motion holding. Somehow they wound up more or less on knees together, on the floor, half under Winters’ desk. Lew sometimes tightened the touch of his mouth against Dick’s head, or slid it by degrees toward an eyebrow or beginning of a cheekbone, never letting it go altogether—keeping contact, keeping close. He felt the skin sucked lightly on his throat as Dick breathed in, in shudders, through his nose.  
  
“Dick?” A twitch. “No, wait—”  
  
Immediately Nixon regretted speaking. Cold air poured over his chest as Dick scrambled upright, startled. Lew could hardly have imagined a less pleasant result of raising his voice. A loneliness, a chill, where the firm and febrile warmth had fit so seamlessly; a crack and wince as Lew’s kiss on Dick’s scalp was displaced by a clip from the underside of the desk; and worst, the look of shame across Dick’s face. A soldier’s shame—the look of blank, deadening humiliation, of total self-effacement through utter expressionlessness. Lew saw it plainly, Dick making ready to obliterate the parts of him that would have him touch, feel, flutter, breathe in Nixon’s skin.  
  
He felt sick with himself for this, and sorry for himself. He wanted to let his hand dart to where Dick hit his head—to finish saying _no, wait, that isn’t what I meant_ —but this was not what he had broken their soft silence for.  
  
Dick watched Lew cautiously with his best blue-eyes-assessing stare, focus skittering a little—taking in everything, suppressing a response. For the moment, the impulse that had sent him into Nixon’s chest was spared.  
  
Finally, Nixon sighed, slumped back.  
  
“This was all my fault,” he said heavily.  
  
“What was?” Dick said. “Lew?”  
  
“I should’ve known what it’d do to you. Coming out of Easy Company right after getting hit that bad. You are the best man for this job, y’know, and I mean that. Sink agrees with me. But that’s not why I…”  
  
“You?”  
  
Lew rubbed his eyes hard with flattened fingers, dragging his palms across his face, grimacing—trying to scrape off, shuffle off, wince off, the feeling of Dick watching him.  
  
“I put your name in for that promotion. Sink thinks what I thought, he was gonna do it anyway. Sooner or later. But me, I couldn’t—”  
  
Dick blinked at him.  
  
“You?” he said again. “Lew? Why?” He straightened himself into a crouch on the balls of his feet, steadied against the edge of the desk with his hands over his head, and didn’t give Nixon a chance to answer him.

  
“Those soldiers—” he began, catching his breath. “Those men were _counting_ on me. Nix, you know Easy Company as well as I do. You know how much I need—”  
  
“Dick.”  
  
Dick hung his head, staring hard into the floor between his knees.  
  
“ _Dick._ ”  
  
“Twenty-two injured,” Dick said. “One kill.”  
  
“Dukeman. Yeah, Dick, I know.” Nixon almost spat. "You know there were three hundred Krauts out there? Twenty-two hit, one killed—Dick, that's a slap on the wrist."  
  
“I need the chance to make it up to them," said Dick, as if unhearing. "That’s all I can think about, and I can’t do it from here, not from behind a desk. You knew that. You know that.”  
  
Nix was silent, but he didn’t look contrite. His mouth was fixed in his familiar, partly-pitying smile—the one negotiating straits between sharp pain and solace, with tender, narrowed eyes and wincing lips.  
  
“Here’s what I know,” he said. “Sink was gonna promote you anyway, in time, but me, I wasn’t waiting. I came to him the second you proved yourself in the field. Ask me why? Shit, Dick, I’m scared. Dick, I’m scared all the time. It only takes one kill to kill you, same as Dukeman, same as anybody, and I just—”  
  
Nix wiped his mouth on his sleeve and sat up, fully face to face with Winters. He wasn’t breathing hard, but something audible was pressing in his throat. His eyes were dark and wide.  
  
“—I asked to get you off the front first opportunity I saw. Sure, it’s only temporary. You’ll be back out there before you know it. But if there are days the toughest thing you do is sit behind a desk, days I don’t have to—I want you to _live_ , damn it. I _need you to live_.”  
  
If anyone else had dared to utter such a selfish, ugly thing—to place his life at higher value than the lives and spirits of his men, to spare him not out of strategy but personal want, to think somehow their love was worthier than all others to meddle with his fate—Winters would have stood in awe. He would have balked, and stormed away in speechlessness, in righteousness, disgust, disquiet and contempt.  
  
But the part of him that first leaned in to Nixon’s arms had escaped its firing squad of faceless shame. In Dick’s dumbfoundedness it had squirmed free, and it raced toward the sound that kept on ringing in his ears, _It’s me, I want, I need—_  
  
The drawling, faintly bashful _what?_ that formed on Nixon’s lips was smashed in infancy by Richard Winters’ kiss. Hastened into, almost stiff-mouthed; almost-scowling, almost still. Only a pressure, scarcely short of crushing, Winters’ long hands cupped like spades around the base of Nixon’s skull.  
  
Nixon felt his face screwing up like a child’s in pain. Felt his heart fighting underneath his tongue for liberation like a hit man’s in the final field. He remembered vaguely what it had been like breaking his nose when he was young. The temporary blindness, deafness, dizziness were all the same.  
  
When he had his bearings, Nix kissed back, and differently. Where Dick remained unmoved, controlled, firm, dry, Nix wriggled, slipped—he prodded, smeared, and bit. He was loosened like a lush, wet-tongued like someone hungering, so much so he actually slid from Dick’s lower lip and fell to kissing inaccurately at dimples, at his cheeks and chin.

  
Dick was laughing, mumblingly, low. He gripped Lew’s shoulders and tried to force him further to the floor, beneath the desk as if it were a kitchen-table bomb shelter—but Lew shook him off and tackled him into the light, half-lifting their bodies to a stand. When they knocked together on the wall, a sift of whitewash snowing them with mite-sized stars, they felt each other firm through their fatigues, and slowed.  
  
Lew grinned blearily at the corner of Dick’s mouth, forgetting how he hadn’t had a drink in hours; Dick went close-lipped, quiet. Lew leaned hard against Dick’s thigh and dropped the smile. Dick’s face had flashed from red to white. Still, it was Dick, again, who moved—who steered his hand downward along Lew’s belly and grasped his belt as deftly as he would the handle of a duffel bag. The sharp side of his cheek felt cool as it moved past Lew’s face, toward his ear; he breathed faintly on the base of Lew’s neck.  
  
Dick’s hand on his belt was fierce but also almost motionless. Dick’s nose and mouth, browsing in the dark-haired spaces of Lew’s nape, scarcely stirred—they only rustled there with measured inhales-exhales, poised, perhaps, or come to rest in a deliberate hovering. He assumed the body language of both the very brave and mortally afraid, at once forward and restrained.  
  
Lew was used to the satin fumblings and flourishes of drunkenness, of drunk girls flattening their calves against his drunkly-bending back with liquid, lilting movements; he was used to slipping and insinuating, lolling heads and roars and shrieks and scrambling to shrug off underthings. He wasn’t used to this. He kept writhing under Dick’s determined touch, trying unconsciously to tease, provoke, propel, but Dick only deflected, catching flyaway limbs and grins and winces, training them back into focus and pinning them in place with kisses. He even curbed Lew’s hands as they tried shakily toward his crotch.  
  
“What’re you doing, Dick?” Lew reddened to hear himself rasp.  
  
“I don’t know—” Dick mumbled, though not abashedly—absorbedly, as if Lew had interrupted him assembling something.  
  
“What?”  
  
“No, Lew, I don’t know what I’m doing, not exactly, that answer your question?”  
  
Lew half-pushed himself away to look straight into Dick’s face. He meant to do it with the expression of someone in desperate need of unbuckling, someone strained, exasperated, serious—but Dick was smiling like he couldn’t stop himself in spite of fear and bravery. He let the struggling smirk on his mouth collapse into a laugh, and Lew laughed too, involuntarily.  
  
They were panting on the whitened wall, cocks crossed together through their pants, laughing hard. Dick leaned back and looked up, chuckling at the sloped slat ceiling; Lew placed his palms on the wall beside Dick’s elbows and hung his head, laughing at what little floor was visible between their feet, then fell back against Dick’s chest. They felt each other’s laughter rumble in their lungs, shaking them, jostling. Lew’s laughter cut with a quiet groan.  
  
Dick tightened his grip at Lew’s belt and began to kiss him harder. Faster. Everywhere. That made Lew laugh again.  
  
“I’m gonna take your belt off,” said Dick, suddenly concentrating.  
  
“Okay,” Lew said. He was slurring somewhat. Chewed his lip. “Do that.”  
  
Dick had good hands. Lew’s pants were unbuckled, unclosed, before he even felt it—relief as his hard-on lifted a little into Dick’s lap. Dick seemed very serious again. Shook slightly. Decided on another kiss.  
  
“Okay,” Lew repeated, and made a second grab for Dick’s belt.  
  
Dick dodged him and tumbled them both down to the floor, kneeling over Lew, palm flattened on Lew’s cock. Kissing Lew’s poorly-shaven neck. Hesitating, if not refusing, to move his hand—reluctant to press himself against Lew’s belly even as Lew raised his hips to meet him—watching, listening for twitches and for signs—  
  
Wait. It was awe. It was anxiety. It was Dick wanting Lew to _like_ him, for Christ’s sake.  
  
Lew finally got a hold of Dick’s belt. He slipped his hands under Dick’s waistband and clasped his naked thighs. Craned up and kissed him. Bit. Pulled. Dick grunted, grin reopening, and pushed up under Lew’s shirt. Curled his other hand in Lew’s boxers to the textile sounds of catching breath and scratching skin. Lew’s stomach was warm and thrumming to the touch; his breast stretched, beaded, shifted as he wrestled Dick against him.  
  
Lew almost didn’t care where Dick put his hands. Whatever stroke or squeeze he felt was something filled his mouth, rattled on the roof of it like a hum, music with a hot metallic taste. Filled his eyes with water, swimming haloes, hopping lights. He coaxed at Dick’s tongue with his tongue. Kissing as a way of keeping close.

***

  
Morning of October 14th found them curled together on the floor, Winters’ field jacket pulled over both their bodies, Nixon locked under Winters’ arm. They’d slept like this before, but that morning it was not a closeness to be shaken off with red eyes kneaded open, chins lathered, boots laced, drabs tugged straight and buttoned.  
  
That morning they rolled slowly over after the gaps of misty sun that strayed across the room until they came awake aching. They leaned sleepily together, reached across each other for real coffee in the kitchen; thumbed fresh cream out of its ceramic dish and found the heather blooms placed in a tin can beside the bread, cheese, jams, apples, irregular brown and white eggs. It was likely the latest morning of Dick Winters’ life.  
  
Lew loaded a plate for both of them and they sat on the same side of the breakfast table, Dick’s left elbow on Lew’s left shoulder, right hand picking hungrily at crusts as soon as Lew had finished buttering them for himself. Lew mocked exasperation at him.  
  
“Well, how ‘bout it, Dick? Gonna sign off on some work orders today? Approve some ammo shipments?”  
  
Dick laughed with his mouth full of rye.  
  
“Yeah,” he said, looking amused, “sure.”  
  
They left the house that day, though they stayed on the farm side of the birch trees and low garden walls, never going out toward the road. They picked up stray shells from the weeds behind the chicken coop, Dick teasing Lew for shying from the hens. They walked from one end of the old barn to the other, over hay-strewn stones, between vacant livestock stalls and troughs of untouched grains; through sun that squeezed in dusty shafts through slats and bullet-holes. They found cows in unlikely places. Occasionally a little girl, in boots and apron both too big and frayed for her, would run out into the farmyard calling names of livestock like lost cats—but when she saw the wandering Americans, she always shot a sidelong smile and ran around corners to hide.  
  
Afternoon was cool. A fog had settled on the fields without quite whiting out the sun, so the light came ripe-wheat-colored and diffuse upon their sides, and insects tsked from golden grasses milling feathered heads in mists like oatmeal. Damp lit up Dick’s hair; Lew grasped Dick’s neck when he saw him shiver.  
  
They watched dusk drooping on the pastures with their backs against the bullet-hole-filled barn. Dick was leaning on his hands, which he had clasped behind him, face turned to what little warmth peered past the haze. Hotter than this winter sun, in the beginnings of a blush, he felt Lew’s eyes on him. He knew the yellow light had turned them brown.  
  
“Hey,” said Lew.  
  
“Huh?”  
  
“Nothing. Just…” Lew put his shoulder up on the barn so it was pressing Dick’s, and looked out in the same direction so he could see exactly what Dick saw, or pretend to. “Making sure someone’s home.”  
  
“Oh.” Dick sighed through his nose and glanced between the trees that edged the fence. “Yep. Still here.”  
  
He turned his head toward Lew before removing his gaze from the field. He smiled as if shyly confiding, but when he finally brought his eyes to Lew’s, his brow went back to furrowing.  
  
“I’m happy, Lew.” His lips were slightly blue. “And that seems…” He looked at the round puncture-marks in the barn, clustered exactly where their two heads met.  
  
Lew tightened his mouth sympathetically.  
  
“Yeah, I know.”  
  
Dick unclasped his hands and brought them out, squeezed white, from behind his back so he could take Lew’s face between them. Kissed him to the smell of sour milk, wet hay, dewy grain. Tousled Lew’s hair on the back of the barn. Lew grabbed his elbows and they slid down to a sit, knees blackened in the grass. Their noses were wet with the frosts and pollens tossed together by the autumn of this place. They kissed, sniffled, and grinned. The light rose over them as the sun got low, left their tangled bodies sinking into shade.  
  
The little girl, cold hand snagged in the bridle of her cow, made a startled sound when she caught sight of them. Lew struggled free with a shout and stood as if to chase her.  
  
“Lew—!” Dick snatched at Lew’s wrist, slow to straighten where he sat, but the girl had already gasped and fled. The cow mused at the two of them, making a chewing movement with her mouth—Lew standing there, feet spread defensively, eyes tawny and contracted in the sun, Dick reaching after him. She looked so patiently clueless, as if waiting for one of them to explain, Lew unconsciously cast around him for something to say. He found Dick’s face and both of them lapsed back into laughter.  
  
Caught kissing on a barn wall full of bullet holes, duties abandoned, cackling at a dairy cow.  
  
Lew pulled Dick to his feet and pushed him backward over the knots of weeds that edged the barn. Held him against the wall, in the last and highest shaft of red-gold light, with his elbow against Dick’s chest threateningly, faces fractions of an inch apart. Looked determined nearly to anger if not for the smiles that spasmed in his eyes. He grazed Dick’s lips but leaned in further, kiss landing instead on the crease of his cheek.  
   
“Let’s go get warm,” Dick said gently. Lew snorted at an innuendo he knew Dick to be incapable of having meant.  
  
Inside, then, there were mugs of coffee—steaming, almost full, forgotten. Neither had bothered with the lamps. Orange squares of twilight tapered on the hangings until everything was heathers, blues.  
  
Dick could hardly make out Lew’s face under the covers, but he seemed less than steady. His skin was damp, and he kneaded his nose as if trying to work out a headache. When he slipped away Dick heard the click of his foot locker opening in the other room and rolled onto his belly, head pressed in the pillow, trying not to listen. When Lew came back, he dropped a kiss on Dick’s neck that burned a little. Whisky. Dick could not suppress a strained sad twitch.  
  
“Not much,” Lew said. “Just a little. Barely any.”  
  
Dick turned on his side and dragged Lew to him. He pulled his tongue around the lining of Lew’s mouth as if he could have sucked the venom from the wound. Lew laughed and flattened himself against Dick’s ribs. All this beating of their insides through bare skins. Hearts red dogs trying to get at one another through the fence.  
  
Lew lay on his stomach on top of Dick and covered his ears with his hands to kiss him. He wanted him to have to feel Lew spell the words against his face.  
  
October 15th Dick awakened early, when dawn had barely begun to stir at the horizon with its paler pinks and whites, and Lew was smelling stale beside him. The stovepipe was already hot. He heard the family moving downstairs, clattering tin dishes, speaking sleepily in Dutch. He didn’t get dressed, but lit a lamp and shaved with icy water anyway. He heard a cow crying for its keeper from the dark farmyard. He felt safe and secret here. He felt, somehow, stupidly, that Lew’s body, lying behind him on the bed—even in sleep, even weak for lack of drink—kept him protected. He remembered how this had been the only thing Lew wanted. Rubbed the idea from his eyes.  
  
In stocking feet, a wool blanket pulled around him, he came into the next room and sat down behind his desk. He lit the lamp there, and the little stove, and read some, wrote some. In the poor light, unwelcome images rolled rudely over blank white spaces in his papers. Focus compromised, he stood and sorted things instead. He found himself listening too hard for the moment Nix rolled over on the bed.  
  
Sun thawed the walls when the family downstairs had long since scattered to the fields, the town. He heard Nix, muffled through the door and several layers of wadded sheets, half-conscious and confused.  
  
“Dick?”  
  
Dick bit down a smile before returning to where Lew was huddled, squint-eyed and stiff-haired, bare legs kicking out into a patch of dusty sun.  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
Lew looked up blearily at Dick and tossed his pillow toward his feet. He stretched out to take hold of Dick’s waist, hard under his hands, in a way that made Dick set his lip and blink. He drew Dick to a kneel on the edge of the bed.  
  
“Morning,” said Dick warily.  
  
“Hmm.” Lew felt up to Dick’s face, touched the sticky smoothness of his cheek, and gave him a little shove. “You shaved. Fuck. How long’ve you been up?”  
  
“Long enough.”  
  
“Shoulda woke me.”  
  
Dick laughed sarcastically.  
  
“ _That_ would’ve been pleasant.”  
  
“Don’t get cute with me, Winters.”  
  
Lew dragged himself upright, rocking on bare feet. He was chewing at the corner of his mouth, but his eyes, though red, already crinkled at the edges in a smile.  
  
It was brighter than it had been the day before. Drier. The birches flashed yellow leaves like masses of chattering canaries. In the garden there were white blooms floating from the weeds. Dick felt the sun start steaming on his back here in this stove-warmed room. Soon hot air would be rippling at the windowpanes.  
  
Lew stood there, rough and shiny-browed. That worried crease across his forehead always, brother to the creases fondly bent in brackets around Dick’s straight mouth. It betrayed his air of carelessness, just like Dick’s smile lines did his seriousness. Dick was starting to understand this. Nothing about Lew was truly effortless, the way Dick never felt indifferent. He stared at this sunswept half-smirk struggling to be a man, to be a man at war. And was in love.  
  
“I’m kidding,” Lew said, yawning and raising his elbow to scratch his head. “Be cute all you want.”  
  
Dick threw his arm over Lew’s chest and brought him down against the straw-stuffed mattress, knocking him breathless, blocking up his mouth with kisses. He left Lew no chance to answer him with any nip, word, touch. He only knew Lew held him tightly by the hips as he crouched over him, and kissed back with the bucking, desperate head of a boy held underwater.  
  
Lew on his back, straw prickling through his hair, Dick Winters on all fours around him. Dog tags dangling. Hands hooking in the elastic of his underwear. And all Lew could think of was how Dick smelled like shaving soap while he was here with whisky on his sweat, his breath; how he’d been rock hard in his dirty boxers from the second he heard Dick shuffling at the threshold and had stood there, smiling obscenely, making no attempt to hide it. No—what he thought of most was how, in spite of all this, Dick still ducked in to kiss him on the lips.  
  
Dick kissed Lew’s belly, then, and then his thighs, and then the insides of his thighs. Nothing clumsy even as he slipped Lew’s boxers down around his ankles, rolled his hand up across Lew’s balls, held him by the base of his cock and brushed his mouth against it.  
  
“Christ.”  
  
Lew’s body read Dick’s newness to this in his precision. He didn’t have the forgetfulness or the invention of someone with practice; he was trying too hard to get it exactly right, maybe, but shit was he effective.  
  
The bottom dropped from Lew’s stomach and his hands went numb against Dick’s forehead as Dick interpreted his oath with a tongue pushed over, pulled away—so loud in Lew’s ears he forgot, for a second, something he had meant to, _had to say_ —  
  
“Stop that,” he gasped at last. He pushed away Dick’s shoulders with his knees and laughed at the expression of surprise when he looked up. “Come here—”  
  
Forget his straining cock. Forget how Dick’s mouth felt there, deliberate as his kisses, smooth and tight as its own kind of muscle. Truth was, his right hand knew its way around. He wanted to feel Dick’s lashes on his face again.  
  
“Sorry,” said Dick under his breath. “That bad?”  
  
Lew pulled Dick toward him by the undershirt and kissed him on the chin.  
  
“Shit,” he said. “Shit, no.”  
  
He sucked the freckled skin at Dick’s collarbone and made him groan. He nosed along Dick’s neck and fumbled for the waistband of his boxers. The breathless stillness that seized Dick at the feeling of Lew’s fingers sliding over him stung Lew with a satisfaction so intense it almost closed his throat.  
  
The sunshine and the stovepipe had turned the cool blue room into a swelter, livid, white. Dick’s shirt had turned translucent in the center of his chest. He was still on hands and knees but half-fell onto his elbow as Lew worked rough breaths out of him, his mouth held slightly open, touching wetly on Lew’s temple here and there. He thrust into Lew’s hand; Lew huffed approvingly and pushed against him harder.  
  
It wasn’t long before he came. Lew blamed himself for this—he’d felt Dick make a helpless sound, twitch dangerously in his hand, and couldn’t resist rearing up to nip Dick’s earlobe, slide his tongue down the line of his jaw, tug painfully on his bottom lip, slip in a sudden quicker stroke. Dick set his sweat-bright forehead on the sheets with the blank-eyed awe of someone stricken blind.  
  
“Fuck,” he breathed.  
  
Lew’s mouth fell open in absolute, hilarious disbelief. He rolled onto his side, keeping his soiled hand slightly off the mattress, and stared, astonished, at Dick Winters’ blushing, angelic, never-so-much-as-taken-the-Lord’s-name-in-vain, Anabaptists-of-Lancaster-County face.  
  
“You did not—”  
  
“You didn’t hear a thing,” said Dick, but closed his eyes and laughed, still short of breath.  
  
They had another late breakfast, necking over fried eggs, this time an autumn crocus in the tin can with the heather blooms. Lew amused himself by swearing heavily within Dick’s earshot.  
  
“Pass the _fucking_ butter, please.”  
  
Dick cuffed him on the head.  
  
“Lew, enough!”  
  
Lew laughed half a glass of milk out of his nose.

***  
  
They spent another day and night like this. They found spots all over that seemed suddenly to have been built, by God or Nature or the barn-raisers of Schoonderlogt, for supporting both their bodies. Snags of wildflowers in the yellow shade of bedsheets glowing on the clotheslines. The close-growing birches on the field-side of the farmhouse. The room where Dick was supposed to sleep, with its desk, its walls supporting strategic maps, its tiny wood-burning stove and narrow child’s bed. The hayloft, where Dick dragged Lew like an embarrassed boy and kissed him in the sweet cool harvest-smelling dark until he cried aloud and sent a chicken flapping from its hiding place.  
  
On Monday afternoon, something went wrong. Went different. Dick and Lew had scrambled up the stairs, alfalfa matted in their hair, still laughing at the startled chicken, to topple on their backs across Lew’s bed.  
  
They scrapped like teenagers. Dick had learned to bite, but he was still too gentle always—could never quite unmaster himself. He tugged Lew’s skin between his canines more protectively than anything and somehow still electrified. The warning bite of something loving in the wild. He sat up on Lew’s lap with Lew’s hands tucked beneath his thighs so they could feel each other nervy, stiffening; he swung his hips forward so Lew’s breath would whistle through his teeth; he backed onto his knees so he could kiss Lew’s hip, shin, the callused knuckles of his feet.  
  
Lew, half propped speechlessly against the wall, buried his face in the crook of his elbow at the flick of Dick’s tongue down his arches—twitched his leg reflexively away with a one-beat laugh and nearly blacked Dick’s eye.  
  
“Whoa. Okay.” Lew’s voice hitched. “Okay. Jesus.”  
  
Dick raised his eyebrows.  
  
“Well, Lew, can’t say I’m surprised.”  
  
“I’m ticklish,” Lew snapped, but failed to keep a straight face.  
  
He hissed loudly at Dick’s breath on his instep even before the second kiss touched down, and sweat stood out; his mouth peered in a struggling smile from under his arm, his free hand blanching as it twisted in the pillowcase. Dick tongued under Lew’s little toe and risked getting kicked in the throat to hold it softly in his lips. When he laughed at Lew’s expression, his mouth pulled tight, and Lew’s belly fluttered helplessly.  
  
“I’m gonna lose it, Dick,” Lew said numbly, muffled.  
  
Dick lifted his head and held Lew’s foot in his palm, moving slowly forward, bending Lew’s knee slightly so he could reach to kiss his navel. He ringed his mouth around Lew’s cock and gave a pull that crammed the corners of Lew’s vision with bright swarms. This time, Lew knew very little—the ceiling swam and all he could hear was the rhythmic rush of their staggered breathing, their limbs scratching on the sheets—but he was sure he did not want Dick to stop.  
  
He wouldn’t finish in Dick’s mouth; dragged him back up for a wincing kiss as he came into a fold of covers. He could sense Dick’s annoyance at this—Dick, who never forgot that they were guests, who knew full well what he was in for when he felt Lew arching under his tongue. Still, Dick curled his arms around Lew’s body and pulled him slowly off the wall, laying Lew down on the beneath him, grinning through the kiss from end to end.  
  
Lew’s hands were shaking as he pushed his damp hair from his forehead. Dick rubbed his jaw discreetly and lowered himself next to him.  
  
“Captain Winters,” Lew said, as if from far away. As if from home, or peacetime—adolescence, anywhere—all the distant ages, places, hours in which he and his body ever felt completely safe. “God, I love you.”  
  
Dick rolled his head to meet Lew’s eyes, brushing noses with him on the way. The Adam’s apple stuck in his narrow neck as he swallowed, stared. He opened his mouth, closed it again. He was smiling everywhere but in the shape of his expression. A love like sun and straw.  
  
Lew was a Yale kid. He had read _Ideas of Order_. He had read a poem titled “The American Sublime.” _One gets used to the weather_ —or whatever dappled in Dick Winters’ face. Freckles, feeling. Or, _The spirit itself—the spirit and the space—_  
  
Lew dozed. Dick stayed awake, searching the accidental sadness of Lew’s sleeping form for how to say it back.  
  
When Lew woke up, he seemed sick, gray-faced, like his head was spinning as he straightened. He pressed Dick’s knee with a clammy hand and shuffled from the room. Came back with a whole unopened bottle of Vat 69 and no glass. He sat against the windowsill, backlit in another fogged white afternoon.  
  
Dick’s stomach knotted, hard. He checked his watch.  
  
“Lew, it’s—”  
  
“Fifteen twenty-three,” said Lew sharply. “Yep. Got it.” He wasn’t smiling, wouldn’t catch Dick’s eye. He struggled with the cork. Dick got up and unstopped the bottle for him before he knew what he was doing. Lew took it back and raised it in a toast, still looking somewhere on the floor between Dick’s feet.  
  
“Five o’clock in New York.” He quirked his mouth unconvincingly. Dick did the math.  
  
“Lew, it’s really not.”  
  
Lew shifted in his seat and swigged.  
  
“Want me to go?”  
  
Lew didn’t answer.  
  
Dick’s face barely changed, but he had dropped his gentleness. He shrugged into his uniform, gathered his boots under his arm, paced out with his hand nudging the doorjamb.  
  
“Hey, Dick,” Lew said. He sounded hurried, urgent, apologetic. Dick looked back and Lew had met his eye, though falteringly. “Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “I mean, I still—I mean, I meant it. Really. I just…” He trailed away and pretended to look out the window, giving the Scotch bottle a little shake. He smiled horribly.  
  
“See you tomorrow,” he said. Dick knew better than to turn around again.  
  
By the morning of October 17th, Dick has weighed and played out every formulation likely to have floated through Lew’s head between _I love you_ and _tomorrow_. Except, maybe, “The American Sublime,” which he has never read, and, even if he had, would not strike him as particularly apt.  
  
Lew is an alcoholic. Dick’s gotten this far, at least. That worries him to pieces enough, flat on his back in this dead child’s bed, seasick, hungry, lip bloodied with biting. It explains the sweats, the shaking, even the anger, the avoiding him. Dick saw Lew take three drinks in three days, and now he hasn’t slept for hearing all the bumps and stumbles from the room next door. It’s his fault, in a way, for kissing Lew back out of reach of his foot locker since Friday. He knows Lew is increasingly uncomfortable drinking in front of him. He feels judged, and he is. Dick doesn’t hate for men to drink in general. He hates for Lew to drink.  
  
But he has to believe Lew can handle himself. Otherwise—  
   
So he should have said he loved him. That’s it, maybe, probably—Dick’s silence, unforgivable. He thought Lew knew. He thought he shouldn’t have to echo. If he’d had just another second, he could have said something for himself, something that really _meant_ —  
  
But Lew had to, has to have known. He’s loved Lew since Georgia, since he was the dark boy with a blue chin, a lopsided smile, a drawl, an easy saunter, black brows that never quite seemed to lift from their half-concentrated, half-sardonic furrow, uneven often. Boy who chuckled low at everything, the only one whose eyes dared beam when Sobel stared them down, who hovered half a step behind Dick, not like a shadow, but like a kind of watcher, always out of harm. Boy bearing an aegis. Dick’s constant Two-Okay.  
  
Lew was the first to see Dick freeze in the barracks when Guarnere asked where he was from. Lew, assured pain in the ass of every prep school headmaster he’d ever had, pulled Dick aside and taught him cheek, how to say things like _Lieutenant Sobel does not hate Easy Company, Private, he just hates you_ —things to make the men laugh, to make them like him. And he learned. But Dick could only be clever naturally with Lew. Could only smile with all his teeth at Lew. Could only say the right thing, the funny thing, the honest thing, without needing time to calculate, to think, when it was with Lew. Dick has stepped unconsciously into the protective circle cast by Lew’s terse class-clown indifference, Lew’s slightly acid easiness, Lew’s _cool_ , from day one at Toccoa. No, Lew has to know.  
  
So Lew doesn’t love him. So Lew said what he said because he’d just been sucked off by a man who would and will do anything for him, when the war had kept him out of women for Lord knows how long—but now, in daylight, Lew has come to his senses, finally been appropriately repulsed by the idea of—really, his _best friend_ —  
  
So there is something Lewis Nixon can’t forgive. That Dick loves him. Or that he showed it. Or that he didn’t say. Or, there is nothing to forgive, and instead, after all, against all chances, there’s a chance—  
  
Dick is awake and pacing long before the orders come in. The little girl trips up the stairs to get him when the aide starts rapping at the door. Dick registers her look of recognition and her wary glance around for Lew. He realizes that, in minutes, he’ll have to be the one to wake him.  
  
The curtains have been drawn tight in the next room. Dick lifts them open, letting thin light slide across his face, watching the car wobble down the drive as something to occupy him before he turns toward that low bed, that bare shoulder. The air seems boggy, brown; tobacco smoke clings greasily to the leaves of roses in the drapery. Dick opens the window to breathe.  
  
Below him are the birches. A cow, slipped from its tether, paws at the carcass of the kitchen garden, hide quivering unconcernedly as it roughs its tender knees on thistles, mistaking white-bloomed weeds for botflies, lacewings, bees. The smell of the farmyard wears mercifully away at the unclean sweat-smoke-blended-whisky closeness of the room. Whitewash. Buttermilk. Mown hay. He feels a wrench as the halo of these few charmed, accidental days deflates in him, as if under the wheel of the aide’s car trundling back to base. He remembers the 5th. Dukeman, but that’s almost not what bothers him. That German boy—  
  
He remembers Lew passing him a canteen—“Yeah, it’s water”—on the roadside. He remembers recommending Moose Heyliger, _I’m losing Easy, I’m losing Easy_. Sink told him there was field work ahead, not to worry about administration, but he remembers days of blankness. He remembers watching Sink smoking, proud of him, and thinking only _now I’m losing Easy_. Blank administrative days. Blank days away. Nix told him twenty-two had been a lucky number. Twenty-two okay. Dick didn’t like to think he felt casualties harder than the other captains, but those days away—  
  
Today he’s back. Today he makes it up to Easy—along with the entire battalion, it would seem. He would be thankful for the orders coming in at last, after all this petrified inaction, if not for—  
  
Something is throbbing at the back of his throat. A new nerve, maybe. He sets his jaw and wills his mind to quiet. He has to say something. He has to look.  
  
“Lew?” The lack of an answer rattles him, even though it’s what he most expected. He turns and sees that Lew has partly closed the hangings by the bed. He falters; peers out the window one last time. “Wake up. They want us back at regiment.”  
  
He didn’t expect that to work, either. He twitches open still more hangings, switches tone.  
  
“C’mon Nix, get up.” The light is frail; he claps his hands sharply. “Let’s go.”  
  
He scrapes the curtains on their hooks back from the bed. Lew makes a pathetic sound, little more than a sign of life, but even so, hope flutters in Dick’s stomach. Maybe they can, at least, return to normal. He chooses the familiar route—the fraternal bossiness, the intimate intolerance.  
  
“C’mon, something’s up, Strayer’s orders.”  
  
Nix is less than half awake. His mouth is buried in his pillow, and he doesn’t move. Like this, he’s as useless as a dead replacement.  
  
“ _OKgoheadI’llberighdown_ ,” he slurs into the linens on a single, stinking breath.  
  
At least he’s speaking.  
  
“Let’s go! Come on—you got ten minutes.”  
  
Dick checks his watch, ensuring that they have at least an hour before they’re due at H.Q. If Nix made it to the bottom of the bottle, Dick has an accurate sense of just how much cold water, how much coffee, how many cigarettes Nix needs before he’s fully upright and in possession of his faculties. They’ll be on time as long as they start applying these restorative measures about five minutes ago.  
  
“ _Goway_.”  
  
Dick blanches, but persists. He does his best not to assess the likelihood that Nix never wants to see his face again. He claps him briskly on the hip.  
  
“Come on. Come on, big guy. Let’s go.”  
  
“ _Ahh, leemelone._ ” Less loathing in his voice this time, as muffled as it is.  
  
Dick glimpses the water pitcher. This usually works.  
  
“Okay,” he says, by way of warning, and upends its contents right where Nixon’s face is flattened to the mattress.  
  
Nix bolts up on his elbows with a revolted groan.  
  
“God— _damn it!_ ”  
  
Wipes the wet out of his eyes, and, flinching, smells his hand. Looks close to tears.  
  
“Aw, that’s my own _piss, for Christ’s sake!_ ”  
  
Fuck. If there were ever such thing as a final straw.  
  
But then, by what must be nothing other than God’s own albeit limited mercy, Nix hurls his pillow, not a fist. He sits back helplessly, still swearing, as a laugh of sheer relief bucks up in Winters’ lungs—a laugh that lapses into the familiar chiding one as soon as Dick realizes that of _course_ Nix doesn’t hate him; that all of this is not only forgivable but scarcely short of typical. That nothing, Dick realizes, _nothing_ —not Lew, not Easy, not this precious and impossible span of yellow and gray days at Schoonderlogt—is truly lost.  
  
Lew is awake. He’s furious. He’s having what even he would call a damn low moment. But he is also remembering Dick’s face, remembering how much he loves. In a killing rage made meek by adoration, just as Dick is going weak with laughter, Lew springs forward and does utmost to tackle Dick onto the floor—which is, in his present condition, admittedly not very much. When he finally pins him down, he suspects it’s only because Dick has let him.  
  
Nix holds Dick below him by the wrists. He reeks of piss, of course—it glistens on a face gone red and twisted, blood vessels worming at the temples, hovering two inches over Dick’s. On his back, Dick can’t stop laughing. Nix’s groggy morning wood is tough against his hip. He feels himself responding automatically, but pays little attention.  
  
“You’d better get cleaned up,” he says smartly, almost triumphantly. Laughter rattles in his nose.  
  
Nix stops scowling at Dick and wrinkles his brow, flicking his eyes down to the corner of Dick’s mouth. Something suddenly suspicious glitters there.  
  
“So had you,” he says. Dick blinks at him.  
  
“Wha—no, oh no, _oh no you don’t—!_ ”  
  
Grinning wrathfully, Nix ducks down and, in a great, repulsive, steamy waft of piss and whisky, leans in for a kiss.  
  
“Nix! No!” Dick struggles, but Nix seems to be recovering his strength enough to keep Dick’s wrists pinned over his head—he can’t get free. He feels Nix’s cheek warm, pungent and damp against his own, and nearly gags. It’s one thing to have your own piss in your face—  
  
“Lew, I swear—”  
  
“Or what?” Lew asks him, cackling now. “Or what?” Ducks in again.  
  
Dick almost knees Nix in the crotch, but catches himself—hasn’t he done enough damage?—and instead, half accidentally, draws his leg up in a tight, suppressed slow motion against Nixon’s inner thigh. Thus Nixon’s cock is fully cured of its hangover.  
  
Nix wrestles down across the distance Dick’s raised knee has placed between them and actually succeeds in planting a salty, sour, slightly ammoniac kiss dead center—right upon Dick’s open lips.  
  
Dick grunts and gags and spits, spits upward into Nix’s face and ends up misting both of them with a foul mixture of spit and piss. Lew growls and kisses Dick again as Dick fights to screw his mouth up against the smell, the wetness, the saturated filth—but both of their faces are already grimy, stinking, slick. Dick even has piss dark on the breast of his field jacket by now, and Nix is looking thoroughly pleased with himself. Meanwhile, though Dick knows he’s been smeared with much, much worse, he still has no idea how their hard-ons are surviving this.  
   
“Ten minutes?” says Nix, expression edged with hopeful skepticism. He sits back on his heels and moves his palm half wistfully along Dick’s belly.  
  
“Closer to sixty,” Dick admits. His breath catches at the hand that browses delicately downward—but, nostrils still burning with the smell of Nixon’s piss, he can’t resist another jab. “Didn’t expect you to be ambulatory in anything less.”  
  
“Huh.” Nix shakes his head and chuckles, but pushes himself onto his feet, stumbling. He makes it to the washbasin and starts bathing, stripping off his piss-stained undershirt to palm cold water to his chest.  
  
Still sitting on the floor, Dick unbuttons his jacket. Nix tosses him a damp cloth for scrubbing out the spots on its lapel. In the mirror, Nixon smirks at him.  
  
In the mirror, Dick straightens, stands, and reaches down past Nix’s naked back to get his own handful of water, which sails into his face and just as quickly runs along his breast, darkening his t-shirt and the waistband of his pants. Nix only looks at him in their conjoined reflection, keeps shaking his head.  
  
“Sorry about the piss,” Dick says lightly.  
  
“You shoulda found a place that had a shower,” Nix answers. Dick wets his hand in the basin and shakes it off over Nix’s head.  
  
“Oh, yeah, thanks. That really did the trick.”  
  
Nix takes a breath and plunges his entire face underwater. Comes up streaming, shivering, but clearer at the eyes, if a little bit dejected. Dick snatches up his shoulders in a dirty towel from the floor.  
  
“That was a mistake,” says Nix.  
  
“I’ll light the stove,” Dick offers, pressing the water out of Nix’s hair.  
  
“Nah,” Nix says. “The Scotch.”  
  
“Oh, really?” says Dick, barely bothering to feign surprise. “You call downing an entire bottle of Vat 69 on the business end of the Allied advance a mistake?”  
  
“Nah,” Nix says again. “I mean, I—shouldn’t have let you think—”  
  
Dick stops toweling Nixon dry.  
  
“What?” he says. His voice steps down from its sarcasm and remains there, gentle, patient. “Lew, what is it?”  
  
Nix swallows blearily, hitches his mouth into the beginning of a grin but lets it fall and shakes his head again. Without thinking, Dick thumbs a droplet of clear water—this time, thank God, neither whisky, spit, nor piss—from Nixon’s lower lip.  
  
Nix’s pout immediately splits into a laugh.  
  
“God damn it, Dick!”  
  
Dick leans in, but Nix catches him roughly at the chest and shunts him back. He wants it to be him.  
  
Lew reaches up and kisses Dick like nothing else, forgetting to even shut his smile.  
  
“Ah—” Dick starts chuckling again, incredulously, against Lew’s unshaven cheek as it dimples into him. “We’ve gotta get you some—mmh—coffee—”  
   
“Coffee?” Kissing underneath Dick’s jaw and tasting shaving soap again. Raising the hem of Dick’s shirt, pulling him close by the small of his back, hard, so he can feel—“What’s coffee?”  
  
Lew rocks Dick against him and knocks their bodies back across the bed, his knee crooked on Dick’s hip. Holds Dick down for kissing with a hand pressed flat against his forehead. Dick keeps laughing, but Lew feels the seriousness of his rising chest, his rolling shoulders, his neck attempting to stretch from the mattress, his mouth opening toward Lew’s bare breastbone as it beats above him, out of reach. Lew’s dog tags clatter on Dick’s teeth.  
  
They grapple fast. Lew shifts to let Dick slip out of his shirt, long since remorselessly unsmoothed; out of his belt, his trousers. Lew doesn’t have much left to remove. He kicks his boxers free and slides along Dick’s thigh, first with his hand, then with the underside of his erection. Dick’s whole skin seems to toughen the touch, and Lew shoves his cock upward against Dick’s, fists anchored in the ticking beneath Dick’s head. He feels the mattress sinking with a crinkle at his heels as Dick’s feet dig desperately into straw stuffing.  
  
Dick has given up on firmness, on control. He lures and tongues, he latches, casts out roughly to grope behind Lew’s knees before he finds his thighs. He drags Lew tighter to him, lunges, hips his way upward roughly, nudges. When he feels his cock caught in the cup of Lew’s quick hand, he wrestles to support himself with an arm hooked over Lew’s back as it arches. He reaches down and hastily reciprocates, causing Lew to tumble over him, his body dark against this early unlit room, in this gray morning.  
  
Lew buries his face in the bed as Dick finds his rhythm, rapid and natural, and twinges at the deepness of the tug; feels his back go steamed and damp. He tries to keep the pace, but Dick’s low belly-moans distract him, send his senses eddying off into ecstatic blurs and whorls. He tucks his lip between his teeth and concentrates, bowed low over Dick’s hot forehead now, working with his hand, nearly competing, sometimes loosening his grip so Dick will kick his hips impatiently.  
  
In spite of all this, Lew comes first—Dick senses him starting to struggle and broadens his strokes, slipping down against his balls, tightening by degrees as he pulls back, until Lew digs in with his knees and hangs his head and mouths oaths messily—and he is furious. He lets go, smears ungraciously away and kisses on the inside of Dick’s knee, pleased to feel him palpitate perceptibly. He noses faintly through the feathered skin over Dick’s thigh. Closes his lips around the side of his cock and slides—  
  
Dick twists over at the shoulders down into the mattress, hips still angled upward, with his mouth and breast hugged hard into the coverlet, bracing his arms to strangulate the sound he makes. He contracts against Lew’s jaw and Lew sees him through just short of lazily—vindictively—by hand. He hears Dick’s muffled, winded laugh and shifts his body softly up his back.  
  
They lie together like this, naked, messy, Lew’s arm hinged over Dick’s chest, and stare at the fog that films the window. They are somewhat stuck together, fused and cooling, no better-smelling than before. They do not nod. They do not blink. They are, both of them, wide awake.  
  
“How’s the headache?” Dick asks. Lew lifts his ear and hums.  
  
“What on God’s green earth’s a headache,” he says blissfully, words buzzing on Dick’s shoulder blade.  
  
“Coffee, Nix,” Dick reminds him. “Regiment. We’ve got—” He shrugs from under Lew’s arm to check his watch. “Twenty-two minutes.”  
  
Nix grumbles and makes Dick arch his neck with a wet kiss beneath his ear.  
  
“Got an idea,” he says. “I give you head, you go down to Regiment and cover for me.” Dick uses the smooth but slightly heightened voice that Nix knows almost always hides a laugh.  
  
“Not happening.”  
  
“Pshh. Suit yourself.” Nix hoists himself upright, hooks his boxers on his finger, and crosses lazily back to the basin, searching one-handed for his shaving kit. “But you forget I went to boarding school.”  
  
“Lew!”  
  
Nix shrugs and lathers up. He really must not have a headache—he glows a little, grinning to himself in his reflection, and Dick can hear him hum a few bars of “The Day After Forever” over the razor’s scrape.  
  
***

  
They swing up into the waiting car one after the other, Nix bobbing a little as he lands in the passenger’s seat. He isn’t drunk—it’s not a possibility, Dick knows—but still he seems relaxed, inflated, self-assured in a way Dick hasn’t seen since England. He seemed smug, or, at least, unendingly amused, to see the hyper-vigilant glances cast by Dick around them as they stepped into the chilly bright of day. Dick settled his demeanor instantly, for shame—he sits back and entertains himself by watching and listening with a smirk as Nix lights a cigarette and starts babbling logistics over his shoulder, a slight slur on his tongue, a more-than-usually-pronounced cockiness in his tone.  
  
“I mean, we’re the only unit in the group that’s got the Germans on the German side of the _Rhine!_ ” He pauses to puff at his cigarette and turns around again. “If we’d’ve taken Antwerp, and I’m not saying that that would’ve been easy—” his plaintive grandiosity drives Dick to fondly roll his eyes “—we would be over the river, well supplied, and have the Krauts on their heels!”  
  
Dick loves this. Combed, full-voiced and clean-shaven, Nix looks healthy, handsome, businesslike but edging on elated—in his element, optimistic nearly to the point of nonsense. Nix is well aware that they could not have taken Antwerp—he’s only incapable of passing up a chance to show off what he knows. As they roll under the breezeway at Battalion H.Q., Dick is infinitely glad to be with Nix outside again.  
  
Even so, Dick narrows his eyes at him, still trying to identify the flush, the loudness, the sudden confidence—and then it clicks. Nix has all the swaggering intonation, not of a young man heartened by hard alcohol, but of a boy just come down, fresh and proud, from the best lay of his life. Dick cannot believe what he is seeing.  
  
“Now if i can just get Ike on the phone—are you listening to me?”  
  
The driver stops. Dick hops down out of the backseat and looks back, quirking an eyebrow up at Nix, mocking his knowledgeable drawl. It is the last happy, safe, comfortable moment of his day.  
  
“Hangin’ on every word.”  
  
When he ducks inside headquarters, it’s as if he’s forgotten his fatigues. He hasn’t, until now, realized just how ill-prepared he is for this—for stepping out of hayloft trysts and heather blooms back into the world of tactics, firearms, uniforms. He knows this world far better than the one he’s supposed to have left six minutes down the road—nonetheless, he is beginning to suspect transitions like this are not among his strengths, and has to tamp down a rising sense of panic. It took him almost a week to get his head out of the field after his promotion—this time, going by the officers’ faces as he scans the room, he will not have a week to readjust. He sees Heyliger at his side, and practices.  
  
“Hey, Moose, you too?”  
  
“Yeah, whatever’s goin’ on, Sink is not happy.”  
  
Sink. Dick looks across the room at the Lieutenant General and feels freshly terrified. He’s almost certain Sink can see through him instantly. He remembers guilt. He hasn’t carried out a fraction of his administrative duties since Sink assigned him to battalion XO. The hair stands out on his neck at the idea that Sink might guess what he’s been doing instead.  
  
Sink introduces Nixon and Moose to the British Colonel, Dobie, but doesn’t mention Winters’ name or meet his eye. Dick lingers at the door under the pretense of setting down his helmet, allowing Nix to cross in front of him into the middle of the room. Nix does this with what seems to Dick like incredible readiness and ease, completely shamelessly, even picking up a cup of coffee from one of the orderlies orbiting the table. The old impulse to hide in Nixon’s comfortable, cool wake returns, stronger than ever.  
  
Dick hangs back and waits to be spoken to, not knowing what to do with his hands, his eyes. Too often he catches himself watching Nix, and has to force his gaze toward the floor. They’re talking about plans for Easy Company—a rescue operation, British troops, the river—and the realization that this no longer includes him is slow to dawn. When it does, it’s as an itch, a disoriented irritation. Finally, Strayer pulls him aside. Instinctively, Dick seeks out Nix again; he has to fight to turn his head.  
  
Strayer looks as if he’s run out of patience before giving Dick the opportunity to test it. He asks, accusatory, why he has yet to see the Market Garden AAR and updated battalion TO&E. Dick holds back a flinch. It’s highly possible that, over the weekend, he might have leaned across the TO&E in question while Nixon sucked a bruise the size of Utah beach into his shoulder.  
  
“I’ll have them at C.P. by 1300, sir.”  
  
“And I want an inventory on whatever material the British 43rd left behind—rations, medical supplies, transport.”  
  
“An inventory, yes sir.” Dick reels. A what?  
  
Sink finally barks at him from the other side of the map-plastered table.  
  
“Dick?”  
  
“Sir.”  
  
“I’m still waiting to write citations on that 5 October operation—I need your report!”  
  
“The report, yes sir.”  
  
“Light a fire under it, Dick!” A note of warning in Sink’s voice. Dick nods as firmly as he can manage.  
  
“Sir.”  
  
He clucks his tongue, feeling short with his superiors, short with himself. He’s stumbling at the starting block. He has to get out of here.  
  
He wants to dart away and run back down the road, into the stands of silver birch, into the thistles and the chickens. He turns on his heel toward where he left his helmet, half expecting Nix to follow him. Over his shoulder he hears Sink complaining to an aide— _Now God damn it, we asked for this yesterday, and here it is today, a day late and a dollar short—_  
  
Nix doesn’t look up as Dick prepares to leave. Dick watches him crossing the room with some remark about maps and enemy disposition, leading Colonel Dobie; the affection swelling at the sight of Nixon’s face, turned intently to the side, doing his job with all the focus and distinction he possesses, dissipates in an ebb of grief as Dick opens the door. There is no question any longer: they are, the two of them, back at war. Or, at any rate, Nixon is. Dick feels the itch of leaving Easy getting deeper and more painful in his skin. The need to be beside the men of Easy in the field, the need he’d filled with Nixon kissing, keeping close, is opening again.  
  
He wonders whether somehow, after all of this, Easy Company has come to mean Lewis Nixon to him. He wonders what fields he and Nixon fight together.  
  
He will run back down the road, but not to Lew, and not to heather blooms. He’ll do what Easy needs from him—all he can give from here, all that he has, for now. He’ll climb the stairs up to his tiny, whitewashed, paper-littered room; ignore the birches and the birds; pull himself to the typewriter, already caked in dust, two weeks untouched; and he’ll remember. 


End file.
